Category: ideas

“The question was: How complete an account of the nature of reality could the new physical science in principle provide? Do our minds necessarily escape its reach, even if our bodies are part of the physical world?”

“At least 296 people died in the violent shaking on Aug 24. Many more were left homeless and injured. But those few, fraught and devastating minutes also placed at risk thousands of books, dossiers and folders amassed since past earthquakes destroyed this town in 1639 and 1703. There were also countless pieces of art and artifacts in churches and museums across the earthquake zone, which touches towns in four Italian regions.”

“As might be expected, when the Statue of Liberty turned green people in positions of authority wondered what to do.”

“The labor itself of ‘proving racism,’ and providing testimony is heartbreaking. Talking about it in spaces like poetry workshops, about the craft of it, breaking it down like it wasn’t about living people in that room, as though we can’t spend our entire lives with our own testimony, as though we weren’t witnessing in each poem we wrote? That just seems excruciating.”

As it turns out, there’s a major neuroscientific basis for the link between openness to new experience and creative thinking. Exploration is tied to the neurotransmitter dopamine, which also plays a role in motivation and learning (among other things) and “facilitates psychological plasticity, a tendency to explore and engage flexibly with new things,” the authors write.

Ian Bogost: “Normally we think of play as the opposite of work. Work is the thing you have to do, and then there’s play, the thing you choose to do. But if you think of play as being in things, there are things that are playable, then it becomes the work of figuring out what a thing can do.”

“In my history of Christianity course, we read a number of challenging writers. Each one I ask students to read with as much sympathy, charity and critical perspective as they can muster. But nothing outrages them – not the writings of Augustine or Erasmus or Luther – more than two or three pages of John Calvin”, the “Ayatollah of Geneva.”

“It’s a challenge that renders all the normal visual frames of reference completely useless – you can’t say that green is the color of grass, or blue is the color of water, because they haven’t seen those things. But they have felt them.”

“It has long been thought that our tongues register a small number of primary tastes: salty, sweet, sour and bitter. Umami – the savoury taste often associated with monosodium glutamate – was added to this list seven years ago, but there’s been no change since then. However, this list misses a major component of our diets, says Juyun Lim at Oregon State University in Corvallis. ‘Every culture has a major source of complex carbohydrate. The idea that we can’t taste what we’re eating doesn’t make sense,’ she says.”

“The privately held company, based in San Francisco, has drawn in 70 million people over the past decade to play games that challenge users to remember sequences of brightly colored animations, or to ignore visual distractions and click only on certain objects. The FTC charged that Lumosity oversold the benefits of the games.”